South Lake Soars To Big Turnaround

SOUTHWEST SPORTS

The Eagles Girls Basketball Program -- 8-20 Last Season -- Has Started 16-0.

January 18, 2004|By Emily Badger, Sentinel Staff Writer

Walter Banks was a football guy. He played it in college, coached it at Cumberland University and hung around it at South Lake High School.

So when South Lake Principal Dave Bordenkircher approached him two years ago to ask if he would be interested in taking over the, ahem, girls basketball team, Banks swallowed his gut reaction and politely said he'd think about it.

"To myself I said, `No way,' " said Banks, who wouldn't have watched a WNBA game for pay.

But he thought about it -- with his wife's help -- and decided to take on the challenge. Last season, the team went 8-20. The Eagles lost one game to Osceola 56-6. And that was late in the season.

"I was thinking, `What in the hell am I doing?' " Banks said. "I was going home just depressed, depressed, depressed. But toward the end of the season, my competitiveness kicked in and I said, `I can't go out like this. If I quit this, I'll be quitting myself and these girls.' "

The week after South Lake was knocked out of the district tournament last season, Banks dragged his girls into the weight room. Then he hired a strength and conditioning coach. Then he demanded the entire summer from each girl for extra workouts and summer-league games.

Long story short: After Friday's victory against Citrus, South Lake is 16-0. And those 16 victories are already more than the team has had in a single season in a decade.

Conditioning coach Lorenzo Fields started working with the players in August, with instructions from Banks to hand the team back over to him in November stronger, faster and capable of jumping twice as high.

Fields had been training players on the football team and applied many of the same techniques, working with the girls on everything from weightlifting to how to hold their head when they run.

"When I first got here, I said if we're going to do this, let's make a program," Fields said. "You can tell by the way kids walk, the way they dribble, the way they shoot that they're a part of a program. And I said I'd love to be a part of something like that."

Fields agreed with Banks' philosophy for South Lake: He didn't want to create a team, but a program in the mold of the girls powerhouse at Osceola High School, where Renee Bellamy's players are invited to out-of-state tournaments and scouted by Division I colleges.

The team Banks inherited at South Lake had a long way to go.

"When I got them last year, they dribbled with their head down, they didn't know how to pass. It was like I was teaching a preschooler how to count," Banks said. "They were happy to put on a uniform to say, `I play basketball.' And once the basketball season was over in February, they didn't pick up a basketball again until November."

Banks' strategy involved not only working the girls harder than they'd ever been worked before, but also giving them the kind of verbal reinforcement that's more often found on the football field.

He yelled at them for messing up and yelled at them to get better, and then yelled a little more -- always directly in their faces.

"I hated him at first, and I know he hated me too because I didn't want to work," said junior point guard Jordan Botti. "I was never taught that you have to work to get something."

Botti now leads the team in scoring, averaging 16.5 points per game, ahead of Kaitlin O'Connell's 11 points per game.

Botti and fellow junior Megan Sit both played on the pre-Banks varsity squad as freshmen, an experience that's allowed them to measure the team's progress better than many of their teammates.

"I never really understood it when I was a freshman, but I played a lot," said Sit, a 5-foot-10 center who has been on the receiving end of her share of Banks tirades. "A lot of people were going, `Oh, he just doesn't know how to coach girls, he doesn't know how to handle girls.' But now that I think about it, that's just people pampering me. You don't handle girls a certain way. It's the way you handle a team, and anything he's done, I wouldn't change."

Even Banks has been caught off guard by the team's success this year. He calls each of the team's first 10 victories a surprise. Now people are beginning to catch on, and the gym is starting to fill up on game night with South Lake students who used to mock the team as much as the rest of the district did.

"This season has been a shock," Banks said. "My goal was to come in and be .500, then next year to have a season like this. I thought if we could go .500, it would be a big improvement over last year, but things just start clicking and rolling."